Our Father May Forgive But Not
Solidarity HouseWhen the Cleveland Five, also known as the Freightliner Five, went to
their last union meeting they were told they were no longer members and were
“trespassing.” The quintet tried logical arguments such as reminding union
officials their dues were paid up and they had attended every previous meeting
over the past year. Dismissing their reasoning as well as the spirit of the
Lord’s Prayer, the leadership of UAW Local 3250 summoned the Iredell County
(North Carolina) Sheriff’s Office to send deputies to eject the alleged
interlopers. Allen Bradley, who had played a key role in the UAW organizing
drive at the Freightliner plant in Cleveland, NC, was arrested and eventually
charged with trespassing. Later, with the help of the local NAACP branch, he was
released on his own promise to appear in court.

The Five were among those disciplined by Freightliner
after calling a strike upon expiration of the last contract in April, 2007. UAW
officials in Detroit disavowed it and ordered workers back to work. Some were
required by the company to sign a “last chance” mea culpa–essentially putting
them on probation--before being allowed to return to their jobs. The Five, who
constituted the heart of the shop leadership, were fired.

The UAW bureaucracy has done little, beyond filing formal
grievances heading to arbitration, to help those discharged for following the
old UAW maxim “no contract, no work.” Instead their local struck them from the
rolls.

Just as they have done with the Big Three, Solidarity
House is desperately trying to nurture a “partnership” relationship with the
Freightliner bosses. Daimler, the parent owner of Freightliner, was once their
partner at Chrysler. They don’t want adversarial hot heads like the Five messing
things up. Their half-hearted grievances filed on behalf of the Five are mainly
to protect them from “failure to represent” charges.

The Five have been appealing for solidarity from the rest
of the labor movement with some good response.

South Carolina AFL-CIO president Donna Dewitt said,
“Corporations continue to flock to the South, where they can take advantage of
'right-to-work' laws and intimidate workers. It is incidents such as the
termination of the five Cleveland Freightliner union members that impedes the
ability of unions to organize successfully in the South. When workers see what
happens to union members--union leaders--they will choose not to be a part of a
union. In the end, the corporations win, and workers lose.”

Sister Dewitt, as usual, is right on the money. She knows
what it takes to organize workers in the South–and it’s not pleas for
partnership while union activists are fired with impunity.

You can find out more about this important solidarity
effort by clicking here.

As Seen On TV
My friends who disdain watching television miss out on a lot. For example, there
are these thirty-second TV commercials, sponsored by the “Coalition For the
Future American Worker,” featuring Dr Frank Morris. Dr Morris, identified as
former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, begins
one telling us that some condemn opponents of illegal immigration as racist. As
the screen shifts to scenes of the 1963 March On Washington, the doctor declares
he has been fighting racism all of his life and is now fighting illegal
immigration as well because of what it is doing to African-American workers.
Messages are flashed informing us immigration is responsible for forty percent
of Black unemployment and also for plummeting wages.

This was news to me. Here I
thought ingrained racism, along with the restructuring of industries with large
numbers of African-American workers, were the main factors leading to the
present economic plight of Black America. I was eager to learn more so I went to
the coalition web site.

The coalition has many member
organizations--though most were unfamiliar to me. It seemed a little light on
labor but I did see AmericanLaborFirst.com. Going to that site I was told, “The
domain americanlaborfirst.com is for sale.” In fact, about half the links to
claimed affiliates were nonfunctional.

Eventually I tracked down the
source cited for Dr Morris’s commercial claims. It all traces back to a paper by
a University of Chicago urban policy professor, Dr Jeffrey Grogger. It turns out
Dr Grogger is a Kansas City raised lad who was greatly influenced by what he saw
in our common hometown in the Sixties-- “all this social unrest, this big racial
divide.” He went on to study “common issues affecting minority populations: teen
pregnancy, urban crime and violence, welfare reform, and racial profiling.” With
I’m sure the worthiest of motives, he has now looked at the impact of
immigration–legal and otherwise–on Black employment, wages, and, not mentioned
in the TV spots, incarceration.

Dr Grogger is a statistics
wizard. He likes to correlate things. With award winning statistical methodology
he concludes a ten-percent increase in low-skilled immigrant employees decreased
the wages of Black peers by roughly four percent and reduced the same group’s
overall employment rate. (How this got translated in to the forty percent job
loss claimed on TV is not clear.)

Having earned his PhD in
economics he explains the trend as “basic supply shock”: “when there is a sudden
increase in the supply of a certain good—say, low-skilled labor—its price in the
marketplace declines. Thus, as more low-skilled immigrants enter the country,
the wage for comparably skilled U.S. workers, a group in which Blacks are
disproportionately represented, declines.”

In other words, he’s saying
immigrants, including “legal” ones, have taken over low paying, undesirable jobs
from Blacks. Presumably, the way to correct this would be to get rid of the
immigrants and restore these poverty level jobs to African-Americans.

There may be a drop of validity
in this shaken statistical cocktail but I would submit Dr Grogger wasn’t paying
close enough attention to economic trends already shaping up in Kansas City
during his youth. In the statistical time line he used we saw in Kansas City the
closing of four major packinghouses and the adjoining stockyards; the Fisher
Body/Chevrolet plant in Leeds; Armco’s Sheffield Steel; AMOCO and Phillips
refineries; and the Colgate-Palmolive plant–to name just some of the bigger
losses. African-Americans held a share greater than their percentage of the
population of these tens of thousands of good paying union jobs now gone for
good The same trend has, of course, been at work in nearly all industrial cities
in the Midwest.

It is true that much of the work
formerly done in these closed plants is now performed by immigrants at
substantially lower wages. But this is largely being done, especially in meat
packing, in rural areas where there are few African-Americans. It’s
understandably unlikely that many Blacks will leave their homes and families
behind in Kansas City, Chicago, or the Twin Cities to relocate to rural Kansas
and Nebraska for low wage jobs.

The immigration issue is a highly charged one
within the working class of this country. We need a calm, rational discussion
and should be careful about throwing around charges such as “racist.” The debate
in fact cuts across skin color and ethnic lines. (You can find my general
outlook by clicking here.)

However, the murky forces behind
those TV commercials are clearly doing just the opposite. Those footing the bill
don’t give a rodent’s backside about the condition of Black workers. They are a
cynical attempt to fan the flames of undeniable tension between
African-Americans and Latinos. Peel back enough layers of this odorous onion and
you will undoubtedly find a sub rosa world--maintained by the employer
class--that includes those playing on white prejudices against Blacks as well.
The goal is to keep the working class divided, fighting among ourselves instead
of against them.

Gone Is the Wind
Last March, the Thomas Hart Benton Group of the Sierra Club (Kansas City)
announced a “groundbreaking agreement that can serve as a model for
environmental groups and utilities working together.” The deal with Kansas City
Power & Light (now part of Great Plains Energy Inc) included the Sierra Club
dropping opposition to the construction of the coal-fired Iatan 2 plant, near
Weston, Missouri, in exchange for a commitment from the utility giant to provide
a “carbon offset” by adding 400 megawatts (MW) of wind power, and 300 MW of
“energy efficiency.”

KCP&L opened a 100-megawatt wind
farm last year in south-central Kansas. But now plans for additional wind
generation are “on hold.” The Kansas City Star says, “the deferral of the
second plant, which came to light this week, is raising questions about the
company’s commitment to renewable energy, and whether the other 300 megawatts of
capacity will ever be built.”

So much for the Sierra Club’s
model. The whole concept of “offsets” for additional CO2 is pretty dicey to
begin with. A few days before the deal was cut for Iatan 2 the world’s leading
climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, told the National Press Club, “There
should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants.”